Fiancee and I had a week long trip to London and Paris planned (SFO-LHR, chunnel to/from Paris) with confirmed eVIPs to Business. However, we had to shorten our trip due to work issues a few weeks before we left so everything went waitlist Fortunately our upgrades cleared on the inbound trip (SFO-ORD First and ORD-LHR Business) which allowed us to get some good sleep before arriving in London (although we had to book it across T3 in ORD due to the high winds last week delaying our inbound flight!).
However, our upgrades kept sitting waitlist for the outbound, even after persistent calls to the EXP line with anywhere from 4-7 seats available in Business. Finally, the morning we were leaving, I gave them a call and they were able to confirm us in Business to DFW and First to SFO! Excited we went to LHR and relaxed in the BA First lounge (which is amazing, BTW) and went to our gate. While waiting for the final passport/ticket verification, one of the agents asks if she can see our tickets and says "Oh, we've been waiting for you! Please follow me" and takes us to another desk. At this point we're a little confused as they hadn't started boarding yet so we weren't sure what they had been waiting on us for! The agent there explains that there were two broken Business Class seats on the flight so they had been checking for passengers with connections and saw we were heading to San Francisco. She told us she could send us through ORD on a flight leaving an hour later from LHR but would get us in 30-45min earlier into SFO because of the shorter flightpath and layover...and she could put us in First I laughed and said I see nothing wrong with that and we got our tickets and went back to the BA lounge to relax before the later flight. Only "complaint" was we could have spent some more time in London before leaving had we known about it earlier in the day but the nice ride in the International First Suites made it all worth it!